spotlight

An American from Paris

In February, the Jeu de Paume—once home to French Impressionists, and one of the two great museums that face Paris’s Place de la Concorde—will open a sprawling retrospective showcasing the photographs of Berenice Abbott. A self-proclaimed lesbian before such designations became acceptable, Abbott was a girl from Ohio who fell in love with Paris the moment she arrived in 1921. She luckily apprenticed to the famous artist-photographer Man Ray, and in 1926 opened her own studio, where she made portraits of the intelligentsia (24 of which will be on display)—Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, André Gide, and Djuna Barnes among them. These were familiar faces in the Jazz Age Vanity Fair, which sometimes featured Abbott’s pictures—and which I devoured as a teenager. Abbott went on to become best known for her crusade to gain recognition for the neglected Parisian documentary photographer Eugène Atget. She acquired 1,400 of his glass negatives, and 7,800 prints, eventually selling them to the Museum of Modern Art for $80,000—a steal in 1968.

Abbott’s real turning point came in 1929 when she sailed to New York, intending to return to Paris. Instead, she began a five-year endeavor called “Changing New York,” subsidized by the Federal Art Project, created by F.D.R.’s New Deal. She concentrated on buildings rather than on people. That work will be the centerpiece of the Paris show, curated by Gaëlle Morel, of Ryerson University’s Image Centre, in Toronto.

I first met Abbott in 1951 at a Colorado conference (she would live another 40 years), where she held forth with such fellow stars as Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Wayne Miller, and Nancy and Beaumont Newhall. I’ll never forget my initial impression of her, in the lounge of Aspen’s Hotel Jerome. With her bobbed hair and feline eyes, she wasn’t about to be taken in by the American photo establishment. I just wish she could attend her opening at Jeu de Paume. Her show follows that of the groundbreaking Diane Arbus, and I have a feeling Abbott would have loved that.